As silicon-based electronics heat up, a greater amount of “leakage current” is generated, consuming power without doing any useful work. Such power is released in the form of heat, further heating up the surrounding electronics. Consequently, modern silicon-based electronics typically provide for some mechanism of cooling including both active and passive cooling mechanisms. Passive cooling mechanisms can include mechanisms whose cooling properties are not designed to be adjusted, such as, for example, heat sinks, thermal transfer paste and other like mechanisms, while, on the other hand, active cooling mechanisms can include mechanisms whose cooling properties can be actively adjusted, such as, for example, fans, water cooling pumps, climate control systems and other like mechanisms.
Typically, active cooling mechanisms are designed to maintain a predetermined temperature range irrespective of other considerations, such as, for example power consumption considerations. For example, most modern computing devices comprise at least one fan whose speed is controlled to maintain a predetermined temperature range. As the temperature of various electronics of these modern computing devices increases towards the upper end of this predetermined temperature range, the speed of the fans is increased in order to increase the cooling being applied and, thereby, decrease the temperature and return it back towards the middle of the predetermined temperature range. Such an increase in the speed of the fans is solely the result of the increase in temperature, and does not take other factors into account.
Active cooling mechanisms, such as fans, however, consume power in order to provide cooling capabilities. While modern computing devices do comprise power management capabilities, the power consumption of active cooling mechanisms is not included in those power management capabilities. Instead, the power management implemented by modern computing devices is based only on a performance-versus-power trade-off. More specifically, modern silicon-based electronics, such as computer processors, typically comprise multiple performance states, with higher performance states consuming more power, and lower performance states consuming less power. As such, the power management implemented by modern computing devices focuses either on when lower performance states can be selected to conserve power without impacting performance, or when lower performance states must be selected to conserve power because a power source, such as a battery, is nearly exhaustion. For example, during periods of low processing power utilization, such as, for example, when a user is composing an e-mail message, power management can cause the processor to enter into a lower performance state to conserve power. Such can be especially helpful within the context of computing devices that have limited power resources, such as laptop computing devices that often rely on limited battery power capability. These same computing devices having limited power resources can, likewise, utilize existing power management to force the selection of lower performance states, even when more performance would be desirable, if the power resources of such devices are near exhaustion. However, such power management does not take into account the temperature at which the electronics of the host computing device are operating. Instead, if the power is available, and the processing capability is required, power management will leave a processor to continue executing in a high-performance state even if such results in high ambient temperatures, and will simply deal with such high ambient temperatures by increasing the operation of cooling mechanisms such as fans.